Government

Government Operations Environment

The U.S. federal, state, local, and tribal governments have employees with various types of skills working together geographically and across multiple locations and must coordinate and/or cooperate to fulfill various responsibilities. In May 2013, more than 2 million federal civilian workers were employed in 350 different occupations[1], and these employees often operate in highly demanding, rapidly evolving environments with challenging deadlines and objectives. In these environments, collaboration and timely, effective decision making is essential across the government and with Non-Government Organizations (NGOs) (e.g., Red Cross and contractors) when responding to unforeseen issues that arise with catastrophic events (e.g., terrorist attacks, floods, fires, storms, etc.).

Essential Support Requirements

All levels and organizations in government depend on timely information collection, analysis, and sharing in a secure environment for all of their operations as well as secure shared situational awareness when a crisis is looming or has already occurred. Systems manage increasingly massive volumes of highly sensitive operational, corporate, and/or personal data. Even under normal circumstances, many government offices cannot effectively process the volumes of data streaming through their systems. Government operations and decisions must be supported by automated data collection, event monitoring, information fusion, and analytics—allowing the humans to do what they do best—to make and implement sound, justified decisions while the machines do what they do best—data processing.

CSI’s Cognitive Computing and ActiveEdge®

Cougaar Software, Inc.’s (CSI’s) cognitive computing and decision support solutions help government workers do a variety of data intensive functions such as analyzing data, forecasting changes, and identifying patterns and anomalies to screen for errors or fraud, as well as plan and executing crisis action plans. These applications leverage CSI’s platform, ActiveEdge®, which supports the implementation of intelligent software agent systems while incorporating advanced security, scalability, and resiliency technologies. Intelligent agents offer parallel autonomous processing of data observed through sensors or system feeds, reason over data, and direct processing toward achieving objectives–including sharing data with other agents and initiating actions. CSI uses ActiveEdge® to build agent-based solutions that emulate human cognitive processes supporting analytics and controls, machine learning, adaptive planning and execution, and other applications that involve massive data collection and analysis, distributed parallel processing, and secure information sharing.